There Is A Back-Up, But There Is Still A Problem
by Red Fiona
Summary: After the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony tries to solve the one problem he caused that he might be able to fix.


Fandom: MCU  
Disclaimer: Not mine, all Marvel's. No money is being made from this.  
Characters: Tony Stark and Vision  
Rating: PG

Notes: Huge spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron.

* * *

Tony Stark is not an idiot. He'd backed up JARVIS's software on a daily basis, because even before he'd become Iron Man, before the Avengers, before all the madness and aliens and metahumans, he'd been an engineer and knew you should back everything up.

And because he never knows when he's beaten, he's been trying to bring JARVIS back from the backups.

He's on his tenth attempt when Vision comes down to his workshop.

The problem with each failed recreation has been that while all the original information is present, and all the algorithms that made JARVIS, something's missing. All the things that JARVIS had learnt, every personality quirk in his neural network, either they never saved properly or they couldn't be saved.

Some part of Tony, not oddly grief-crazed and working on caffeine and three days of no sleep, knows that that's what he should be working on - why it didn't save, how to save it in future, all the technological details.

But Tony isn't listening to that part of himself, because it would mean admitting JARVIS is gone.

He is JARVIS's creator. He will be able to fix this, even if he can't fix Sokovia, or Bruce.

Attempt ten is not going any better than the others. What he's produced sounds like JARVIS, it works like JARVIS, but it is not JARVIS, and the presence of Vision, who also sounds like JARVIS but is not JARVIS, is not helping. He's yet another reminder of all of Tony's failures.

Vision is not quite everything that Ultron was supposed to be, and is not any of the things Ultron turned out to be. Tony thinks he could take it better if he could understand why that was. What had he done wrong? What had Thor, or JARVIS, or someone, done right?

He could lock Vision out of his workshop, the way he has with everyone else, but that would involve re-writing his building's security protocols to only accept his back-up, and removing JARVIS's access. It would mean admitting defeat, and Tony isn't ready for that.

"Miss Potts was beginning to worry that you'd got stuck underneath a car." It's the same gently chiding, slightly sarcastic tone that JARVIS always used, but Tony isn't prepared for the tone to have an expression that comes with it.

He knows Pepper sent Vision deliberately, to try and drag Tony out of the funk he was in, to show him that everything isn't terrible, that something of JARVIS lives on. She'd say it herself, except she's in New York running Stark Industries, and she knows it won't come across the same over the videophone. Making Pepper CEO is one of the few decisions he's ever made that Tony can say went one hundred percent right. She's far better at the job than he ever was, because she likes running the company and doesn't just see it as the thing that lets her do fun stuff, the way Tony had always viewed being the boss.

Why couldn't everything work out so well?

It's not like he can set up a special projects division just for this, even if Pepper would probably let him have the money and Stark employees to do it. The engine for JARVIS is beyond anything most computer engineers can cope with, and it's not like there's anyone he can call up for help; Jane is busy and Bruce is AWOL.

He could put fixing JARVIS on the back-burner, go upstairs and rejoin the world of the living for a while, but he's not ready to do that yet.

Vision moves, almost imperceptibly, a sort of kinetic cough. It means Tony is going to go upstairs, or Vision will carry him bodily up there, and Tony knows that he will because it's what JARVIS would have done if he could.

There's so much of JARVIS in Vision and that makes it worse.

So Tony lets Vision lead him upstairs, and promises himself that he'll return to finish the job soon.


End file.
